Can you imagine the shit storm if an American company like Exxon had an oil spill in the English Channel like the one Britich Petroleum has in the Gulf of Mexico?

Actually american companies have done all sorts of bad shit around the world. Like that company that was responsible for a toxic gas leak in India that killed over a thousand people.

Lord Tebbit: former UK trade secretary

At least on the other side of the Atlantic the conduct of President Obama over the great oil spill is explicable, even if despicable. The whole might of American wealth and technology is displayed as utterly unable to deal with the disastrous spill – so what more natural than a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political presidential petulance against a multinational company?

It is time that our American friends were reminded that they sang a different tune when the American company Union Carbide killed many thousands of Indians at Bhopal. Not to mention when the American company Occidental killed 167 people on a North Sea oil rig in 1988.

At the very least, the president might acknowledge that the company directly responsible for the Gulf disaster was American, not British. He may be holding on to some Democratic Party votes, but he is storing up a great deal of ill will that he might regret at some time.

Perhaps BP may be reluctant to say much about that because it would highlight the fact that the company now lacks not just the technical expertise to operate drilling rigs or refineries, but almost anyone in the company competent to assess and monitor the competence of its contractors. The much acclaimed strategy of getting out of the dirty and difficult jobs of exploration, extraction and refining in favour of branding, distribution and sales now seems to be rather less clever than when Lord Browne was riding high as the boss of BP.

It would be unwise to think that BP’s run of expensive accidents is just bad luck, or even individual manegerial failure. It may be that the strategy, while no doubt both New and Modern, is inherently dangerous, as the management is no longer in control of actions for which it has to take responsibility.

BP, British Petroleum is actually an American and British owned company. The American sub-contractors were responsible for the oil leak. And UK and American pension funds are heavy investors in BP shares, so Obama attacking the company is affecting British and americans pensions in a negative way.

Man up Obama. By law BP has limited liability, but it's gone much further than it legally needs to in covering costs.

"Telstra has signed an $11 billion deal with NBN Co to transfer customers from its copper network onto the National Broadband Network's fibre network and share Telstra's infrastructure ... The agreement still requires shareholder approval and ACCC approval. Telstra expects shareholders will be able to vote on the deal in early 2011."

Yeah, what the deal is is that the national telephone monopoly (which was privatized) now will give access to their facilities so that the NBN Company (god knows what that is) can run fiber alongside the existing copper lines.

Previously Telstra was not going to allow access to their assets (which is reasonable -- if the government wanted control they should not have sold off a national asset).

In any case, this is positive news for Foolz and Homer because it means the $43 billion infrastructure plan will go ahead in the major population centers. Means nothing to me, as according to the plan my area won't be covered.

*That answers that, "The Australian Government has created a new company, NBN Co Ltd, to
build and operate the NBN right across Australia." So they've created a company within the government to replace the company they sold.

"The NBN will connect at least 90 per cent of premises with
Fibre-to-the-Premises technology providing speeds of 100 megabits (Mbps)
and the remaining premises with next generation high speed wireless and
satellite services that will deliver speeds of 12 Mbps or more, with
average data rates at least 20 times higher than most people experience
today."

I'll let you know when that happens Election is coming before March 2011, so probably sometime after that.

Today, the court granted our motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s lawsuit with YouTube. This means that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement. The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online.

They'll have to demonstrate damages. It'd actually be an interesting case as theoretically the opposing party would have discovery rights, which would reveal much more about North Korea than they would want revealed.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
has approved a cybersecurity bill, Protecting Cyberspace as a
National Asset Act (PCNAA), that would give the president far-reaching
authority over the Internet in the case of emergency.

As The Hill explains, the bill, sponsored by Sens.
Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, and Tom Carper, would give the president
"emergency authority to shut down private sector or government networks
in the event of a cyber attack capable of causing massive damage or loss
of life." The original bill granted the president the authority to
"indefinitely" shut down networks, but an amendment to the PCNAA,
approved yesterday, mandates that the president "get Congressional
approval after controlling a network for 120 days."

Collins noted that she takes issue with the "kill switch" term. The Hill writes,

"It's been frustrating to read some of the
misrepresentations of our bill in the cybersphere," Collins said,
arguing the new bill actually circumscribes the president's existing
authority and puts controls on its use. "I believe the substitute
amendment we're offering strengthens those protections even more."

As we wrote here, the bill would also see the creation of a
new agency within the Department of Homeland Security, the National
Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC). Any private company
reliant on "the Internet, the telephone system, or any other component
of the U.S. 'information infrastructure'" would be "subject to command"
by the NCCC, and some would be required to engage in "information
sharing" with the agency, says CBS4.

The Canadian political front has been encompassed by the hosting of the G20 summit in Toronto, with the main focus being security. I thought that they were pushing a bit of FUD to justify the obscene $1 billion costs. I thought that there was little reason for concerns of shops being broken into, riots and chaos -- it's a political summit, and this is not a heated political landscape.

What I underestimated was the empty, heartless, arrogant, malevolent, self-serving, world-hating, bigoted and opportunistic bastards that people are. This is an excuse. It's an excuse to smash things, to scapegoat moral blame on politics when they just wanted to make others' lives that much worse.